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RE: Tech Writers Running Servers

Before you agree to anything, make sure the persons asking you to take this
on understand that this will eat a good chunk of production time (at first,
anyway). Just make sure you realize what you are committing yourself to,
and be careful not to spread yourself too thin.

If this is an NT file server, that is about the easiest server to set up and
maintain. Find any good book on NT server and have at it.
If it's an inexpensive Unix server your needing, I might suggest FreeBSD
over Linux. Linux gets more hype, definitely, but FreeBSD is, in my opinion
anyway, a more stable server platform (the sources are still based on the
old System V code from the 60s). Yahoo runs on FreeBSD. If you are going
this route, and intend to use Samba for file service, get the O'Reilly book
on Samba. It's a pretty tough beast to wrestle with the man pages alone.

With a decent knowledge base, some practice, and possibly some mentoring
(online newsgroups and mail lists are great) and a good chunk of free time
to apply your knowledge, any person who has a decent degree of technical
aptitude, understanding of basic computer hardware, and the patience of Job
can learn to setup and maintain a basic file server.

My organization is frustrated with the IS department at our large research
university. They are particularly frustrated by the difficulties of
getting things placed on the community server.

As the resident writer & web person, they have asked me about running an
independent server for them. I am intrigued by the idea but I don't know
whether I am really up to it, tech-wise. I am computer literate (programs,
HTML, etc) but I always perceived servers as being the exclusive domain of
people with MIS or computer science degrees.

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